There is a continuing need for improved methods and apparatuses for compressing/encoding data and decompressing/decoding data, and in particular image and video data. Improvements in coding efficiency allow for more information to be processed, transmitted and/or stored more easily by computers and other like devices. With the increasing popularity of the Internet and other like computer networks, and wireless communication systems, there is a desire to provide highly efficient coding techniques to make full use of available resources.
Rate Distortion Optimization (RDO) techniques are quite popular in video and image encoding/decoding systems since they can considerably improve encoding efficiency compared to more conventional encoding methods.
Additional information, for example, may be found in a Master of Science in Computer Science and Engineering thesis titled “A Locally Adaptive Perceptual Masking Threshold Model for Image Coding”, by Trac Duy Tran while at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, May 1994.
As there is a continuing desire to provide even more encoding efficiency, there is a need for improved methods and apparatuses that further increase the performance of RDO or other like techniques to achieve improved coding efficiency versus existing systems.